Albania, the “Land of Squipetars”, well known from the books of Karl May, is possibly the most rapidly growing tourist-destination worldwide. However, detailed and easily accessible information to the country´s richest treasury, its enormous biodiversity, is still scarce.

„Illustrated Flora of Albania” is the first book in English that covers all the wild plants of a Balkan country, thereby including also a nearly complete and fully coloured iconography. More shortly treated are only some plant genera still insufficiently studied in Albania, e.g. largely apomictic groups like Taraxacum, Rubus, Alchemilla, Hieracium or notorious difficult grass-genus Festuca. Naturalists relying more on photos than on collected material hopefully will be able to determine most of the plants alone by comparison with the 5769 single illustrations. This should be possible even in more critical groups (e.g. Apiaceae, Brassicaceae, grasses, sedges), due to a lot of detail-illustrations, showing fruits, seeds etc. For each species, additional information like flowering-time, life form, preferred habitat is given in the dichotomous keys. Relevant sources are documented in a comprehensive reference-list.